Forest dependence and community well-being in rural Canada: a longitudinal analysis

A drill by any other name: Social representations, framing, and legacies of natural resource extraction in the fracking industry

“…Research on natural resource extraction industries focuses on how the presence and characteristics of a natural resource extraction industry influences social outcomes, including well-being (Kusel 2001) crime (Freudenburg and Jones 1991), social capital (Brown et al 2011), and community stability (Beckley 1995). Communities with greater dependence on a single natural resource extraction industry tend to experience lower levels of well-being (Beckley, Parkins, and Stedman 2002;Freudenburg, Wilson, and O'Leary 1998;Parkins, Stedman, and Varghese 2001;Stedman, Patriquin, and Parkins 2011). Dependence, coupled with a lack of control over the resource, leads to uncertainty and fear over future economic prospects.…”

Review of Risks to Communities from Shale Energy Development

“…However, contrary to these assumptions of increased employment and economic growth, an array of social and economic research has found that these benefits are short-term compared to longer–term substandard social and economic performance when compared to similarly sized communities without nearby natural resources. − Resource dependence (as measured by the percentage of people employed and/or deriving income from this sector) tends to be associated with spikes in short-term employment and economic activity. Over the long-term, natural resource dependent communities experience relatively high rates of unemployment and poverty, instability, inequality, crime, and low educational attainment. − These findings are reasonably robust across different measures of dependence, and over time, revealing the emergence in many places of lasting and persistent under-development associated with resource dependence. ,− These disappointing outcomes of natural resource dependent communities have led to term “the resource curse”, a term that was originally applied to the substandard outcomes of developing nations otherwise rich in mineral wealth but has increasingly been applied to the resource dependent communities of developed nations as well. − A similar set of reasons for this underperformance are suspected at both the nation and community level: susceptibility to volatile economic patterns related to mineral development, a lack of wealth captured at the local level, decreased outside investment, a lack of economic diversity, and ineffective governance . When taken as a whole, the outlook for resource-dependent communities is rather gloomy; however, individual communities will vary in the range of outcomes they experience, on the basis of factors such as location and size …”

Positive dependency and virtuous cycles: From resource dependence to resilience in urban social-ecological systems

“…The extensive literature on resource dependent communities, especially those based in dependency on the extraction and processing of raw materials such as forest or subsurface mineral resources, suggests that when social systems depend on a single resource or environmental attribute, they tend to be more likely impoverished (Elo and Beale, 1985;Freudenburg and Gramling, 1994;Humphrey et al, 1993;Machlis and Force, 1988;Machlis et al, 1990;Nord and Luloff, 1993;Overdevest and Green, 1995;Peluso et al, 1994;Stedman et al, 2004Stedman et al, , 2011 and less resilient to sudden changes (Adger, 2000;Adger et al, 2005). Such thinking has spawned a generation of research addressing the well-being of natural resource "dependent" communities.…”